The only people being released from jails were about 2,000 illegal
immigrants who were facing deportation. The Department of Homeland
Security released them, citing “looming budget cuts.” That’s just more
gamesmanship. Put another quarter in the panic jukebox.

"Like
the asteroid headed to earth, they’re coming! $86 billion in automatic
budget cuts. And don’t bother trying to duck,” hyped CNN anchor Carol
Costello. “So we let these draconian budget cuts take place. You know
who’s going to suffer the most? It’s not going to be Congress. It’s not
going to be the president. It’s going to be us.”

"Kids without vaccines, schools without teachers, and massive airport
delays – we’ll show you the worst-case scenario for government spending
cuts,” CBS morning host Charlie Rose read off the Panic Prompter.

It sounded a little like Bill Murray in “Ghostbusters,” when he was
whimsically warning: “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies!
Rivers and seas boiling! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living
together... mass hysteria!”

Media Research Center analysts reviewed all of the 88 sequestration
stories on ABC, CBS, and NBC from February 14 through March 1 when the
“cuts” took effect, and found 58 (66 percent) were dominated by panic
nonsense, without a second of rebuttal of common sense. Another ten
stories offered the same hyperbole, but at least included a few seconds
of the skeptical view that the sequestration reductions weren’t huge and
their effects were being overhyped.

But for people who read newspapers, there was another worst-case scenario coming.

“The good news is, the world doesn't end March 2. The bad news is, the
world doesn't end March 2," liberal lobbyist Emily Holubowich told the
Washington Post. “The worst-case scenario for us is the sequester hits
and nothing bad really happens. And Republicans say: ‘See, that wasn't
so bad.’”

There is no daylight between the views of liberal lobbyists and the national news media.

This was the same game Bill Clinton played against the conservatives in
Congress in the mid-1990s. The liberals are always presumed to have the
upper hand in the blame game, because the liberals have a very large
Blame Machine known as the media.

ABC’s Jack Smith unloaded this dire warning at the end of 1995:
“Monuments and national parks are shut. So are museums. A long-awaited
rare exhibit of the Dutch painter Vermeer at the National Gallery, eight
years in the making, is closed. And the shutdown now has a human face.
Joe Skattleberry and his wife Lisa both work for the government. Both
have been furloughed. They can't afford a Christmas tree.”

Please suspend all reason and try to avoid wondering how two federal
workers couldn’t spare $50 for a Christmas tree. Smith reported this a
week into the shutdown and before paychecks were even delayed.

They called this a “newscast.” It sounded more like CBS started a super
PAC to run negative ads against Newt Gingrich. They wonder why a strong
majority now tells pollsters that the media is guilty of favoring one
side. The favoritism isn’t just obvious, it’s completely shameless.

We’ve lived through four years of Obama, and as the federal government
overspent us into trillion-dollar deficits every year, no reporter hit a
panic button. The Federal Reserve is printing money like it’s making
Monopoly games, and no journalist is reporting with their hair on fire.
The tax burden on most Americans went up this year, and no one took a
camera and a microphone to interview someone who’ll get by on a few less
thousand dollars this year.

Our journalists talk like they’re not only willing marionettes for the
Obama panic message, but like they’re addicts for ever-growing
government. Every potential spending limitation is portrayed as a dire
and cruel assault on the suffering. In the statist mindset of the media
elites, an American can never suffer from more government, only from
less.

Americans won't feel these GOP-made disasters because they won't
happen. They will, however, remember the hype. Perhaps the press will
understand why only six percent of the public finds them “very
trustworthy.”

FIND OUT MORE

CONNECT WITH US

The mission of the Media Research Center is to create a media culture in America where truth and liberty flourish. The MRC is a research and education organization operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and contributions to the MRC are tax-deductible.